Close to Finishing the Interviews

I have to apologize for just putting up other peoples words on the blog lately. I know that is interesting—probably much more interesting that what I have to say—I did promise that I would try to talk about all of the aspects of my fieldwork.

The interview phase of my fieldwork is coming to a close. Right now, I’m in the middle of translating the interviews I have already taken. I’ve recorded 39 interviews so far, and I have at least three more scheduled for this week so far. Interviewing is an interesting thing. You never know how many interviews you’re going to need. I started out estimating that I would need about 100. That moved down to 70 shortly after I got here. Now, I’m thinking between 50 and 60. What you do with interviews is make a list of different topics that you want to understand. When you start interviewing a person, you start with the first topic and ask him or her everything you can about that. When that person has said everything he or she can about that topic, you move onto the next topic that that particular person will be likely to know something about. In an average interview (about 1 to 1 ½ hours long), you cover three or four topics.

After a number of interviews—you can never be sure how many—the first topics on your list get full. New people stop giving you any new information. That’s when you know you’ve probably filled in your understanding of that topic enough to stop asking about it. Then you move onto the topics that people are still saying interesting things about, or to topics you haven’t covered yet. In fact, as you interview people, they will mention a lot of things you never thought of. Those will become new topics to ask about. You just stick them at the end of your list.

My list is now about gone. I stopped getting new information about people’s everyday lives over a month ago. I stopped getting new information about groups like religion, ethnicity, and country about a week or so ago. I’m now just trying to understand social participation: no matter what religion you belong to, why do you decide to give your time, effort, and/or money to it? Why do people decide to sacrifice for their country? Engage in a protest? Become independent observers for an election? The new material for those questions is starting to get slim. Comparatively speaking. I’m still getting a lot of new information, but not as much as I got in the beginning.

I’m going down to the southern provinces of the country (Osh, Jalalabad, and Batken) at the end of this month. I plan on getting about 20 more interviews while I am there, and most of those are going to be with people who are socially active. I think that will finish my interviewing needs.

My next phase is to create a survey based on the information from the interviews. I don’t even want to think about that until I at least have all of my interviews translated.